Sunburnt and tired we wake up in the Travelodge-esque motel. Today we are all driving to Lubbock, Texas. Lubbock being the home of Whitney and Ashton, our tour guides. My friend Neil is staying for a week before flying back to the UK, whilst I will stick around for quite a while, the aim being to sample real American life.

Ashton is our driver as we leave the concrete suburbs of Austin towards San Marcos, which is a few miles south. We visit an ‘outlet centre’ here, where the other three decide to buy discounted designer clothing, I call home and catch up with the parents. It’s 3pm as we get back into the heat soaked car, which feels like a large-fan assisted oven. The rest of the day passes by the window as we gradually traverse the 400 or so miles to Lubbock.

As darkness sets in I see a lot of wind turbines, and by a lot I mean possibly hundreds

. They cover the horizon in a scene not out of place in a science fiction novel. Lubbock county is flat, very flat. The last two or three hours are as flat as a pancake, in each direction it seems like I can see for eternity. Sporadically we pass through a sleepy small town; most of these have water towers with the town name written on in capital letters. A petrol station appears to be the centre of activity in a community like this. Small towns here are not sought out like they are in the UK.

As the time approaches 10pm we enter the city of Lubbock, population 200,000. Lubbock county got rich through cotton, in fact the top two cotton producing areas in the world are Lubbock and Egypt. Lubbock’s main attraction it seems in this century is it’s university, Texas Tech. Home to 28,000 students it is the main reason why a large percentage of the population reside here.

We enter a never ending grid of roads. Many zigzags later we pull up outside a single story house in a leafy suburb, home to Ashton and Whitney. They live together in what British people would call a ‘granny flat’, in the garden of the main property. However in this arrangement the granny lives in the main house and the child lives in the flat.